Blogs

Students in a comparative political media course used web 2.0 technologies including blogs, wikis, podcasts, YouTube, folksonomies, and syndication to explore the emerging landscape of political media. They explored how and when to use each tool, technical production in the tools, and more generally where political media is headed.

Many institutions have developed a privacy approach for their legacy and business systems. For third-party hosted applications, institutions may have a contract in place that specifies privacy requirements. What we don’t have a grip on are the web-based collaborative applications, such as wikis and blogs, where we neither have a comprehensive policy nor a contract to govern privacy or data use. What are the privacy pitfalls and requirements for each of these three categories? This session will explore case studies of various models in place across higher education.

The use of blogging in education has become a hot topic. This presentation will demonstrate how blogging was used as a learning tool in an online literature course and discuss how the use of blogging supports current online learning theories.

We know our students are different, but in many cases we have not prepared our campuses to support their expectations. Additionally, faculty are pushing us to provide innovative ways to meet our students where they are. In this session, we will share our vision for a platform for digital expression.

Higher education can benefit from the web 2.0 revolution, from simple tools that allow groups to communicate to combining databases that produce an entirely new product. Social networking, wikis, blogs, RSS feeds, videoblogs, and extensive use of multimedia are changing the way we process and use information.

Blogs, wikis, and networking tools appear to gain widespread acceptance. How are higher education professionals using social software tools in their practice? Is there any convergence with what students using them bring to the institution? We will invite participation to explore these questions and determine if there are international differentiators.

Personal authoring technologies have made it easier than ever for instructors and students to contribute their thoughts, experiences, and opinions to a global discourse. In addition, these technologies provide a rich opportunity for instructors to focus their students' attention on discipline-specific questions related to a single course or topic.

This seminar will give attendees valuable "face time" with blogs, wikis, and podcasts in order to critically assess their instructional value and creative potential, as well as the IT infrastructure required to support them. We will demonstrate the numerous technologies UW-Madison is using, discuss the pedagogical application and assessment of these technologies, present an overview of IT support challenges, and provide hands-on experiences with the production of blogs, wikis, and podcasts. The seminar will conclude with a discussion of other personal authoring technologies emerging on the educational horizon.

The practice of using a social network to establish and enhance relationships based on some common ground—shared interests, related skills, or a common geographic location—is as old as human societies, but social networking has flourished due to the ease of connecting on the Web. This OCLC membership report explores this web of social participation and cooperation on the Internet and how it may impact the library’s role, including:

• The use of social networking, social media, commercial and library services on the Web
• How and what users and librarians share on the Web and their attitudes toward related privacy issues
• Opinions on privacy online
• Libraries’ current and future roles in social networking

The report is based on a survey (by Harris Interactive on behalf of OCLC) of the general public from six countries—Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States—and of library directors from the U.S. The research provides insights into the values and social-networking habits of library users.